Archived Articles

EARTHING: The Most Simple Health Breakthrough of All Time

by Douglas Amell, N.D.

An observation of how human beings have interacted with our environment over the eons of our existence can yield some very interesting conclusions. For the majority of our existence, we subsisted on foods the way the Earth gave them to us, in an unaltered form (much like every animal on the planet). Water was how we hydrated ourselves. We moved and exercised our bodies daily in fresh air, because our survival was incumbent on us seeking food, shelter materials, fire materials etc. In addition though, we also were in intimate direct contact with the Earth. The soles of our feet, which have a higher density of sweat glands and nerve endings than any other external part of the body, were able to take advantage of the constant exchange of electrons provided by the Earth. This was true if we were going barefoot, but it was also true to some degree if wearing conductive natural coverings such as leather-soled footwear. For much of our existence, even our shelter flooring was dirt-based. In the very recent history of humanity though, we live in environments with artificial flooring and wear shoes with rubber or plastic soles even when we are walking directly on Earth’s natural surface.

Many studies over the past 15 years have confirmed that this physical disconnection of our bodies from the natural electromagnetic field of the Earth is taking its toll on our health. Finding ways to physically plug ourselves back into the Earth’s natural field and its accompanying 7.83 Hertz Schumann wave, is what the science of Earthing consists of. It is perhaps impractical to suggest we forego all the luxuries and comfort of modern living environments to which we have become accustomed and move back to earth-floored huts or tree houses without electrical appliances where we only move about barefooted. This has been found unnecessary though as research has shown that connection to a simple conductive material plugged into a grounding rod can mimic the electrical and physiological advantages of our bodies actually touching the Earth. This is crucially important to those of us living through a Saskatchewan winter.

Due to the abundance of electrical appliances and signals in our living and working environments, our bodies can take on quite a significant voltage depending on proximity to these sources. This throws our body away from electrical neutrality which can have very detrimental effects on our rhythm of cortisol production in the body. Studies have shown that when people are “earthed” so that their body voltage approaches the 0 mark, their production of the hormone cortisol, which is related to stress and inflammation burden in the body, gets regulated.(1) Science is recognizing that the process of inflammation is behind the majority of physical health complaints that ail us as we age. And, as we age our ability to counteract inflammatory processes diminishes significantly over time.

Although Dr. Ghaly’s research(1) initially intended to prove the concept around earthing as flawed, he did just the opposite. To his surprise he found that earthing reduced nighttime levels of cortisol and shifted the 24-hour circadian cortisol rhythms toward normal.

In the past few years, earthing studies have been mounting, and to tremendous results. Nearly instantaneous beneficial effects have been reported on the brain, muscles, blood pressure and respiratory parameters(2). Clinical sleep studies are demonstrating improvements in a wide variety of parameters that affect sleep quality and duration as well(3).

Since any number of stressors from our modern lifestyles will directly contribute to dysfunction in our nervous and endocrine systems, it is crucial to address the simple the simple ones and hence reduce the overall stress burden on the body when we can. Earthing is being shown to be one of the simplest and most cost-effective ways to do so. And all it requires is for you to physically connect your skin surface to the earth itself. Water enhances conductivity so dewy grass will be more effective than parched dirt for example. In the colder months, simple hand contact against a tree or bush can yield some benefit. The longer one can remain in contact, and with the greater proportion of skin, the more pronounced will be the benefit. Earthing products are being made increasingly available as well, that allow you to enjoy the benefits of earthing through the comfort of your home by allowing you to plug into the earth’s grounding energy with special conductive materials meant for skin contact. www.earthingcanada.ca is a great resource for accessing some of these effective products if interested.

So as with many truths we stumble upon in our lives, often the answers are much simpler than we ever considered. When in health trouble, always try to move closer to nature and to what makes intuitive sense, and you will rarely be disappointed.

The Importance of Omega-3 to Omega-6 Balance in our Diets

by Douglas Amell, N.D.

The exploding field of epigenetics has a lot to teach us about our health, and how the choices we make in living our lives, have a far more profound effect than the genes with which we are actually hard-wired. For decades, scientists believed that DNA determined health destiny for both ourselves and what we pass on to our offspring. The science of epigenetics is uncovering the fact that while you might be born with a genetic predilection to a particular ailment, like cardiovascular disease for example, this tendency doesn’t only come from your parents’ genes, but by how your parents and even your grandparents ate as well as the stresses they encountered in their lives. So, the food choices that we make each day, as well as other aspects of our lifestyle and environment, have the capacity to actually override the health tendencies coded in our genes.

One of the many dietary factors that affect how our genes react, i.e. which gene switches get flipped on or off, is our dietary balance of the essential fatty acids – omega-3 and omega-6. When gene switches get flipped on or off, different metabolic pathways get initiated in the body – pathways that can lead toward more central obesity for example, or others that affect neurotransmitter function and hence the moods that we experience, as just two of countless examples.

Insulin resistance leads to increased fat deposition and more arterial damage, blood pressure increases, tumor propagation, diabetes and food cravings to name just a few complications associated with it. Research has shown that when you add more omega-6 fatty acids to the diet of mammals without a significant increase of omega-3 fatty acids, profound insulin resistance develops. This phenomenon was not noticed when omega-3 fatty acids were added to the diet without concomitant omega-6 oil supplementation.(1)

Extensive research on populations for whom insulin resistance and Type-2 diabetes are virtually non-existent, shows that at the very most, the omega-6:omega-3 fatty acid ratio in their diets was 2.8. And this was for populations that lived closer to the equator. Colder weather climates lend themselves to local flora and fauna having much higher omega-3 fatty acid content. The traditional diet of the Inuit has an omega 6:omega-3 ratio of about 0.04, which means 25 times more omega-3 fatty acids than omega-6 fatty acids in their diets.(2) The ideal ratio in one’s diet is determined by your genetic heredity. From what area of the planet do your ancestors derive – the further north of the equator, the higher the ratio should be of omega-3:omega-6 fats. So people of northern European descent for example, likely require close to an equal ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acids in their diet, and likely even a higher ratio than that to attain optimal health.

When you marry high levels of omega-6 fatty acids with elevated estrogen levels, potentially cancer-generating mis-coding of DNA occurs. This means a type of estrogen-storm can occur in an imbalanced fatty acid environment, causing increasing likelihood of cancer, and especially the hormone-related ones such as breast and prostate cancers among others.(3)

Grains have a high ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids, and so animals fed a grain-based diet will also contain much higher ratios of omega-6 to omega-3 fats in them. The northern grasses of our North American prairies have much higher omega-3 fatty acid content so consuming the products of animals like chicken, eggs, beef and dairy, which have been grass-fed, will lead to much better health than taking in animal products that have been grain-fed or grain-finished. The average North American diet provides a shocking 17:1 ratio of omega-6:omega-3 fatty acids. This helps to explain many of the chronic health problems, including cardiovascular diseases and hormonally associated cancers, showing up in people who follow the common modern North American diet containing high levels of grains, refined foods and grain-fed animal products.

Common commercial oils such as corn oil, soybean oil and safflower oil are all heavily processed and have high omega-6 content with very little omega-3, and so should be avoided as much as possible. Many modern processed foods contain these very types of oils. The other common commercially used oil, canola is generally genetically modified which causes other health consequences including a higher potential for pesticide contamination and so should be avoided for other reasons. Low omega-6 containing oils like extra-virgin olive or coconut oils can thus make pretty useful oils to use in cooking and everyday food preparation but they don’t really lend much if any in the way of increasing the balance of omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acids.

Flax-seed oil has an extremely high omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acid content but is highly unstable at elevated temperatures and so can be damaged easily if used in any kind of cooking; so it makes a great ingredient for salad dressings or adding to smoothies, but is not very stable and so must always be kept at a very cold temperature to prevent rancidity. An incredible prospect for a tasty oil with a high omega-3:omega-6 ratio that is actually safe to use in many kinds of cooking is camelina oil. Camelina is an ancient oil seed that found use as a culinary oil over 3,000 years ago in Northern Europe. The colder Saskatchewan climate makes for a perfect environment for growing this plant. Camelina oil has a nearly 2:1 omega-3:omega-6 ratio and, thanks to a high natural anti-oxidant content, is heat stable enough for many kinds of cooking.(4)

Since food processing eliminates omega-3 fatty acids from foods preferentially over omega-6 fatty acids, one can see that by adopting a diet of less processed foods as well as less commercially-raised animal products, we can be well on our way to improving health outlook. The addition of oils such as fish oil and flax-seed oil, as well as camelina oil to our diets will go a long way toward correcting some of the fatty acid imbalances that are bound to develop from our habits of restaurant-eating and eating foods that have had any kind of processing. By doing so, we can start correcting, or at the very least preventing the epigenetic damage that our unbalanced modern lifestyles tend to create.

Once carbohydrates are eaten, as either simple sugars or in the form of chains of sugars called complex carbohydrates, they break down into the simplest of single sugar units, with fructose and glucose being the most common of those single sugar units.

Glucose is the preferred fuel source for cells of the brain as well as the rest of the body. Depending on how much carbohydrate is eaten at a feeding, as well as how quickly that carbohydrate breaks down into sugar, the body will respond chemically by producing more insulin. This insulin carries the blood glucose into the cells to be used as a cellular fuel source to provide energy for all the cells of the body.

As more glucose enters the cell to be burned, more metabolic waste is created for the cell to dispose of. As any living system burns more fuel, it creates more waste. The lymphatic system of the body, whose vessels are even more extensive than the blood vessel system of the body, is charged with the task of removing cellular waste from the cells. Lymphatic vessels however, do not have muscle cells in their vessel walls like arterial vessels, so skeletal muscle activation is required to help move the waste products through the lymph channels. This means that exercise of the skeletal muscles is required to move waste products from the cells. Pumping of the diaphragm via deep relaxed breathing can serve some of this purpose as well as the pumping action of the diaphragm helps with pushing lymph waste through the body too. This underscores another important, and oft-forgotten function of exercise in the body – the removal of cellular waste.

So, if glucose is being shuttled into our cells to be burned as fuel, faster than the lymph can remove the waste products because we are not exercising enough or engaging the diaphragm muscle enough, metabolic toxins will tend to accumulate in the cells. To protect themselves from getting choked out with toxic waste, the cells have the ability to turn off their sensitivity to the hormone insulin. By doing so, they can protect themselves from receiving a bigger influx of glucose than they can handle. This is the beginning of insulin-resistance.

Insulin-resistance means that the body must produce even more insulin to force glucose from the blood into the cells, past the resistance. So, when carbohydrates are eaten by someone who has insulin-resistance (decreased sensitivity to insulin’s signal), more insulin is produced in response. This might not be so bad if all that insulin did was shuttle glucose into the cells. However, insulin also sends a signal to the body to start storing fat, as well as to create more inflammation and especially in the linings of the blood vessels. This means that when a significant load of carbohydrates is eaten by someone with insulin-resistance, fat will be stored and cardiovascular disease will be initiated among other inflammatory diseases.

A useful method of managing this is to be conscious about eating foods that require a large output of insulin. Glycemic load is the most useful way to assess a food’s impact on insulin production in the body. It takes into account the concept of glycemic index, which has importance but is inadequate in and of itself, along with the sheer burden of carbohydrates being consumed. Glycemic index lets one know how fast that food will enter the bloodstream as glucose.

A carrot, while having a high glycemic index, does not have many grams of carbohydrate, so its glycemic load is not to bad. Someone simply adhering to a low-glycemic diet could be avoiding some very healthy foods like carrots for instance, unnecessarily. So long as one doesn’t over-consume quantities of carrots, there wouldn’t need to be much insulin produced to process its carbohydrate.

Whole wheat bread, on the other hand, has a lower glycemic index than a carrot, but a much higher quantity of carbohydrates, giving it a significantly higher glycemic load than a carrot. As a matter of fact, 2 cups of chopped raw carrot will have a lower glycemic load than one slice of whole grain bread. Any dried grain flour baked food will tend to have a higher concentration of carbohydrate per weight and so will necessarily have a higher glycemic load. This fact explains why it the current practice of advising type-2 diabetics to eat lots of grain-flour products over higher glycemic, low-load foods like carrots, is a horribly mistaken one.

To figure out the glycemic load of a food, take its glycemic index divided by 100. Then multiply this by the number of available carbohydrate grams per serving.

In the first two hours after a meal, blood glucose and insulin levels rise higher after a high-glycemic load meal than they do after a low-glycemic load meal containing equal calories. However, in response to the excess insulin secretion, blood glucose levels drop lower over the next few hours after a high-glycemic load meal than they do after a low-glycemic load meal. This means hunger and cravings will be worse sooner after a high-glycemic load meal. This also means that the number of calories eaten is not nearly as important as what are the sources of those calories.

Multiple studies are showing that the best way to treat and prevent obesity, as well as keep the excess weight off long-term, is to consume a low-glycemic load diet. High-glycemic load diets can however provide much needed, clean-burning quick fuel to the cells of an athlete, so if engaging in regular strenuous training as an athlete, loading up on all sorts of cereal grains, pastas, and higher glycemic-load fuels would have the potential of aiding exercise performance, as carbohydrates are the cleanest burning of all the types of food calories. The issue here though, is that most of us are not elite athletes. And with this being said, cutting down on the glycemic load of meals being eaten would be the smartest way to go for the prevention of obesity, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and all manner of inflammatory diseases. So if fat loss is what you desire, cut out the flour and sugar-based foods and you will be well on your way.

Dispelling the Myth that Being Overweight is the Cause of your High Blood Pressure

By Douglas Amell, N.D.

People are told regularly by their doctors that they have high blood pressure because they are overweight, as if the weight itself is actually the cause of their high blood pressure. And so, they are told that they need to lose that fifty pounds before their blood pressure will have a chance to become normal again.

This is inaccurate because the weight isn’t the cause of the high blood pressure. Metabolic factors in the body that led to the weight gain, are also causing the blood pressure to be raised. So, the weight gain and the high blood pressure are both effects of something else. This something else is a disordered metabolism caused mostly by two factors: a disordered potassium and sodium balance in the diet; and high levels of insulin in the bloodstream, usually due to insulin-resistance.

In my practice, I have seen a person’s blood pressure drop remarkably within a week or two of making appropriate lifestyle and dietary changes – in many cases this is before they have even lost 10 percent of the weight they need to lose. This is proof that the excess weight itself is not the cause of the blood pressure problem.

There is really good news in this, because this means that improvements in blood pressure can occur rather quickly when doing the right things, which are 1) optimizing your potassium and sodium balance, and 2) reducing your body’s requirements to produce insulin.

People are repeatedly told to lower their salt intake to help lower their blood pressure. This measure alone only yields very mild results. When the potassium content of your diet is too low, you will be extra sensitive to sodium in the diet, which isn’t just found in salt, but also in many flavour-enhancers in packaged and processed foods. So, it is even more important to take in foods that have a high potassium-to-sodium ratio. This would include practically every vegetable and fruit out there. Avocadoes and bananas have particularly high potassium content, but eating large amounts of vegetation of any kind will get you the needed results. And when this is done, the body becomes less sensitive to sodium in the diet, so a healthy unrefined sea salt can often still be used in moderation when consuming a diet high in potassium-rich foods.

Sugar, and refined carbohydrates in the diet will actually tend to have a far more pronounced effect on blood pressure than just the salt in your diet, and this is the main piece of information missing from the meager dietary advice conventional medicine tends to offer for high blood pressure. Sugars and foods rich in highly refined carbohydrates (like flour, sucrose, corn syrup, etc…) cause your body to produce a lot of insulin in response to their intake. One of insulin’s effects, other than to store fat all over the place, is to control the tension in the walls of the arteries. The higher your insulin levels, the greater the tension is in your arteries, which causes blood pressure to increase.

This means that a diet where large amounts of vegetable matter are consumed, and lower amounts of carbohydrate-rich foods like sweets, condiments, breads, white rice, and corn and potato products are consumed, will often lead to rapid normalization of higher blood pressures.

Water is another important factor. If there is chronically less volume of water to circulate in our blood, then the heart will be forced to pump harder, to make sure all the tissues of the body get properly perfused with the nutrients they need. It’s like a hose where if you run less water through the hose, the stream coming out the end will be very weak. The only way to get the water to spray far enough is to place your thumb over the end to increase the pressure of the stream. This analogy works for what happens in our circulatory system when it doesn’t have enough water to adequately push through what it needs to, hence the increase in pressure.

Of course other factors like stress play a pivotal role too, but the stress caused by what we put into our mouths is often easier to fix quickly than how we are conditioned to respond to the stressors life throws at us. So, while we take measures to eradicate the harmful effects of stress on the body by exercising more and incorporating healthy stress management practices into our daily lives, we can jumpstart the journey back to more normal blood pressures by starting with the food we take in, and ensuring we drink plenty of water. Excess weight then comes off as a good side-effect of these lifestyle changes.

Acetaminophen (a.k.a. paracetamol) is the most commonly used medication in the world for pain and fever reduction. [1] It is commonly known by the brand name Tylenol. Its use has been extensive in children as well due to a claimed good safety profile when used at recommended dosages. And, even though a 2010 study showed the ability of acetaminophen to cause sterility in the unborn children of mothers taking this drug during pregnancy[2], it is not common knowledge that pregnant women need to avoid this drug, which is a common component of so many over-the-counter cold-and-flu remedies as well as pain-killers, because it had been claimed safe during pregnancy for so long.

Due to trade embargos, Cuba has never had easy access to acetaminophen as a medication, and so is not sold there over the counter. It is also interesting to note that the incidence of autistic spectrum disorders in Cuba is dramatically less than in the United States.[3] While many pharmaceutical drugs are hard to come by due to trade embargos, Cuba does a lot of manufacturing of their own vaccines so childhood vaccination is extensively offered by the Cuban social healthcare system.[4]

Now, it needs to be clarified that this author has clinically witnessed in patients, the negative health impact of vaccines, especially including various neurological consequences and immune dysfunction, and so does not personally believe that vaccines are safe, nor necessarily even that effective when the overall long-term health effects on the recipient are taken into consideration. With this in mind though, it might be too simple to be accusing the MMR vaccine, on its own for example, as causing autistic spectrum disorder, especially when one factors in the curious case of far less autism prevalence in Cuba. For years though, in many parts of the world, parents have been dosing their infants and small children with acetaminophen in certain infant’s and children’s products anytime they got a fever.

On October 17, 2009, the medical journal The Lancet, published a study that found that infants who received 3 doses of acetaminophen following immunization had reduced immune responses to their vaccines. This prompted the CDC to remove all recommendations for prophylactic use of acetaminophen, or any other analgesic for that matter, before or at the time of vaccination in its “General Recommendations on Immunization”.[5] For years, it was considered prudent medical policy to give infants and children acetaminophen in the days leading up to their immunization in order to reduce the feverish responses that commonly follow vaccination with the Measles-Mumps-Rubella(MMR) or DPT vaccines.

Unfortunately, while the CDC recognizes how acetaminophen shuts down immunity when a vaccine is given, it has failed to acknowledge the amazing correlation between acetaminophen sales and prevalence of autism.[6]

A little biochemistry lesson is important here, as it quite simply explains the inherent problems with acetaminophen use. Acetaminophen gets metabolized down a few different chemical pathways once taken in to the liver. Imagine a big river that then branches off into different streams representing the different pathways acetaminophen can take once entering the liver. The major pathway used in most people is called glucuronidation. A glucose-based molecule called glucuronide gets attached to the acetaminophen molecule, and this forms a sort of label that tells the body to send this complex to the kidneys to be excreted in the urine. A secondary pathway is called the sulfation-pathway where a sulfate molecule is attached, which again labels the acetaminophen to be sent to the kidneys. What causes the most problem (but is also likely the reason for the pain-relief effectiveness of acetaminophen) though are the conversion pathway called the Cytochrome P450 system. This is a system (also called the Phase 1 system of liver detoxification) of many different enzymes that often convert many pharmaceuticals to their therapeutically active forms, but can also convert chemicals to some very dangerous temporary intermediate compounds that demand further detoxification. This P450 system converts some acetaminophen into cannabinoids, which elicit an effective pain-relief response. However, one of these P450 enzymes (Cyt-P2E1) also converts acetaminophen to a very toxic compound called NAPQI (N-Acetyl-p-benzoquinone imine for you science geeks out there). This NAPQI is what causes the liver toxicity that acetaminophen-overdose is famous for. It requires glutathione to be detoxified. If glutathione activity is lacking, this NAPQI byproduct of acetaminophen will cause a whole world of problems. If either of the first two pathways mentioned (glucuronidation and sulfation) are overworked or lacking in an individual, then more of this NAPQI gets formed. If two of the river’s three branches get dammed up, the third one gets quite flooded.

Interestingly, a study showed that autistic children tend to have dramatic impairment of their sulfation detoxification pathways.[7] This study also noted that parents and autism support groups often report that autistic episodes are triggered when these children eat “trigger” foods that happen to be high in phenolic amine chemicals like dopamine and serotonin. These reported “trigger” foods include wheat, corn, apples, bananas, chocolate and dairy products, as well as foods like refined sugar which cause an increase in the body’s own manufacture of these phenolic amines. Sulfation is required for the liver to properly handle all phenolic compounds. If there is a weakness in the sulfation-detoxification pathway, then that is one stream-branch the river cannot use properly, causing more flow down the other stream branches, like the formation of NAPQI.

The thing with NAPQI though, is that if it is not properly detoxified, it causes damage to both the glucuronidation and the sulfation detoxification pathways, as well as to the actual glutathione pathway that would be required to detoxify it in the future.[8] So, if an individual has a lowered glutathione capacity, this means that each time acetaminophen is dosed, NAPQI will further weaken those safer detoxification pathways, causing a further strain on the glutathione system to have to deal with increased NAPQI formation from acetaminophen use. So, one dose of acetaminophen might not cause much problem, but when doses are repeated the effects of NAPQI on the body become amplified. For many years, it was advised that children be regularly dosed with acetaminophen before and during vaccination to deal with the fever that could often ensue. This repeated regular dosing would increase the likelihood of more NAPQI being formed from the acetaminophen, leading to an escalating potential for acetaminophen toxicity.

Since NAPQI actually impairs every aspect of glutathione formation, use, and recycling in the liver, it will eventually create conditions where it cannot be detoxified. And this is where the real problems start to happen as it tends to displace what are called sulfhydryl groups in the body. These groups are crucial to all aspects of neurological development in the body as well as to the proper functioning of the mitochondria. And the mitochondria are the power plants for practically every type of cell in the human body.

When urinary organic acids are tested in autistic patients, increased levels of metabolites of Clostridium bacteria and Candida albicans are often found.[9] NAPQI also hampers the beta-oxidation of Clostridium byproducts as well as the aldehyde dehydrogenase enzyme that detoxifies Candida byproducts. So elevated levels of these microbes in the gut due to previous antibiotic exposure can cause real problems for individuals with autistic spectrum disorders. Clostridium metabolites for example, will block the conversion of dopamine to norepinephrine. These two chemicals need to be in balance for healthy neurological function. Relatively higher levels of dopamine will lead to repetitive obsessive-compulsive type behaviors. Norepinephrine, on the other hand, is needed for alertness, arousal, exploratory behavior, and decision processing and behavior feedback. An additional take-home message for all readers here by the way, is the dramatic impact that byproducts, produced by the flora in our own gut, can have on mental and emotional function.

Formaldehyde, as well as mercury and other heavy metals, requires the body’s glutathione system to be fully functional to be properly detoxified. If this system is hampered by NAPQI, then the small amounts of mercury, as well as formaldehyde and other chemical components in vaccines, will have a much more toxic effect on those infants and children. Acceptable safe limits for these toxic compounds are calculated under the assumption that normal detoxification processes aren’t hampered. If a child’s amino acid pools are also low due to poor appetite accompanying fever, a fasted state will also deplete glutathione activity and lead to far greater potential for acetaminophen to form more NAPQI as a byproduct. This fasted state will therefore also greatly increase the toxic potential of toxins like formaldehyde and mercury.

While genetic variability can absolutely play a role with respect to how effective the liver’s natural detoxification systems are, these systems wouldn’t be so taxed if we hadn’t riddled our environment in the last several decades with a million or so chemical compounds never before seen in nature. And since acetaminophen use during pregnancy can harm the glutathione system of the unborn children, mothers need to be very careful about any of the cold and flu type products they take while pregnant, as well as the ingredients of the over-the-counter products for colds and flu-like symptoms of children, as dozens of them contain acetaminophen as an ingredient. Parents need to read ingredient labels carefully.

Great Plains Laboratory, in Kansas, is embarking on some very interesting studies looking for volunteers to provide some simple information to gain further clarity on the link between acetaminophen and autistic spectrum disorders. (https://secure.hostdepot.com/11/498/home/eng/enterstudy.html)

We, as a population, certainly need to rethink the easy reliance on acetaminophen as a pain medication. If its use does become necessary for reasons of quality of life, then certainly one should consider taking N-acetyl-cysteine, glycine and/or alpha-lipoic acid as examples of glutathione-supportive compounds. However, getting to the reason and source of the pain, when possible, and eliminating it is even more important. And as for fevers, we need to stop being so afraid of a fever. Unless a child’s fever goes over 106 degrees Fahrenheit, so long as they are not dehydrated, there is often not much need for concern. Keep them comfortable with cold compresses and ensure they are hydrated. The fever is the body’s way of mobilizing the immune system to appropriately deal with infection. And if fever and the child’s comfort is still a concern, homeopathic remedies can provide a safe and effective means for engaging the body’s natural immune processes to lead to quicker resolution of the situation causing the fever in the first place.

We need to not be too rash in solely blaming vaccines, or the mercury in them, as a source of autism. Although I believe they are an important part of the epidemic, glutathione detoxification disruption, as well as substances harmful to glutathione function, like the NAPQI metabolite of acetaminophen, is probably the biggest unacknowledged key to the whole situation. This information needs to become more public though, as well as research, like that proposed by Great Plains Laboratory, being done to confirm these causative links to autism.